Probably the best legacy of MS-DOS is the number of kids it
taught how to really use a computer.
When I got my first PC (486SX 33MHz FTW!) the ONLY way to run the best games was to get down & dirty with the command line.
Soon you'd learn how to edit autoexec.bat/config.sys and how to zip big files to span several 1.44MB disks.
Before you know it you're playing with BASIC, hex editing save game files & learning how to set up all sorts of ad-hoc networks with friends.
Then came Doom & DEU & things really took off…
Those of us that wanted to see the latest 'cool-shiny' stuff on our computer had no choice but to learn about the ugly innards, & we got pretty good at this 'hacker' stuff as a result ;)
When I got my first PC (486SX 33MHz FTW!) the ONLY way to run the best games was to get down & dirty with the command line. Soon you'd learn how to edit autoexec.bat/config.sys and how to zip big files to span several 1.44MB disks. Before you know it you're playing with BASIC, hex editing save game files & learning how to set up all sorts of ad-hoc networks with friends. Then came Doom & DEU & things really took off…
Those of us that wanted to see the latest 'cool-shiny' stuff on our computer had no choice but to learn about the ugly innards, & we got pretty good at this 'hacker' stuff as a result ;)